Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Whither the Bicycle Coalition?

Oh, dear, the Bicycle Coalition is in disarray, rent by internal dissent, as we await the results of an election by the membership. After years of successfully screwing up traffic on behalf of cyclists in San Francisco, the Coalition is being accused of being "neo-liberal," which, according to Big Thinkers Steve Jones and Jason Henderson, means not being anti-capitalist enough.

The Coalition's odd voting process is so long it won't be over until the end of this month.

I'm not running for the SFBC Board of Directors this year. Instead, I have endorsed the excellent slate of candidates put together by Save Sf Bike!I first tried to run for the Board in 2013, but I was lied to about the election deadlines and illegally kept off the ballot by the then Executive Director (and current candidate for the Board on the slate endorsed by the incumbents), Leah Shahum. I tried to run for the Board again last year, but was illegally prevented from communicating with my fellow members about the election until it was over, by action or inaction of the incumbent Board members (including those running for re-election, who as candidates should have recused themselves from decisions about the election) and again by Leah Shahum in some of her final actions as Executive Director.

These are harsh words, and said with sadness, but they are true. It's important for SFBC members to hear them---especially since the incumbent Board members are, as a body, lying about what happened in last year's election and about what they've done before and since.

3 Comments:

I dropped my membership years ago when SFBC had an online straw vote for Mayor of its members, then they were to endorse based on the vote. I think that was the year Gavin ran against Matt. After the vote, Leah announced that SFBC endorsed Matt. I called here and asked for her to post the voting on the SFBC website and she said it wasn't necessary. I then mentioned that the actually count of votes would tell how strongly the membership went for Matt however she said they would not show it.

The whole thing was rigged, even if Matt won I wanted to see by how wide a margin.